Saturday, December 31, 2011

From an interview with a Facebook engineer working on a new distributed DBMS

Q: What problem are you most passionate about solving right now?

A: As a part of my commitment to solving scale problems, I'm currently writing a distributed SQL database. I think traditional databases have already come up with a great way to abstract data access in SQL, but the context of old implementations has been single-machine based. Very few of these databases have done a nice job scaling up to handle very large amounts of data. In addition, not all databases have different ways to handle data with different access patterns, which results in inefficiency. My new database is trying to address these issues. I'm very passionate about this project because I think I'm getting a head-start on something that people will have to deal with soon.

But as is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They'll be able to edit textbooks that don't fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today. Movable text makes a lousy preservative.

Meanwhile, the BlackBerry-maker’s misfortune continues to be its rivals’ gain. For the same period, iOS’s market share rose 1.4 percentage points to 28.7 percent, and Android’s to 46.9 percent from 43.8 percent.

December’s holiday season brought with it record sales for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet. No surprise, then, that Internet traffic from the device spiked on Christmas day, as Santa’s good little boys and girls fired their Fires up for the first time.

According to Millennial Media, ad requests on its network from the Fire increased 261 percent on December 25th and another 46 percent on the 26th.

Apple design guru Jonathan “Jony” Ive has been awarded a second knighthood by the Queen of England as part of her annual list of honors. Ive has been named Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or KBE for short. When in England or any member of the British Commonwealth like Canada, he will be entitled to be addressed as Sir Jonathan.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Charlie Kindel, an entrepreneur who recently left Microsoft’s Windows Phone team to start his own company, wrote a blog post Monday on why the software still hasn’t taken off. He breaks down what each party in the cellphone business wants — most notably, the carrier and the hardware maker.

The carrier wants to control the customer experience, and the manufacturer wants to own that and the hardware design as well. This is precisely why Windows Phone 7 faces hurdles, Mr. Kindel says.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

SOPA has the support of more than 140 companies and organizations, mainly in the music, book, television, and film industries. Many major Internet companies oppose it.

There's little evidence that similar legislation elsewhere has worked. In 2009, for instance, France passed "three strikes" legislation that was meant to require Internet service providers to cut off access to people who had ignored two warnings to stop trading pirated works. The government set up a bureaucracy to implement the measure earlier this year. But actual enforcement has been slow in coming; ISPs say the task of tracking pirated works is very costly, and they want the government to pay for it.

In the case of the U.S. legislation, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that hiring enforcement staff in the U.S. Department of Justice would cost $47 million over the next five year.

This does not, however, necessarily mean Google is free to do whatever it wants with Java or the JVM

Just before Christmas last week, Oracle got a last-minute gift that it didn’t want in its patent fight with Google: A rejection by the US Patent and Trademark Office of several claims of a patent that’s the subject of their lawsuit.

That means the legislation is going to wind up on President Barack Obama’s desk, requiring his signature, which would make it law; or his veto, which would effectively kill it. That makes it pretty much the first significant bit of technology policy he will face in the new year.

What’s not entirely clear is which way Obama is likely to decide. So far, the administration hasn’t sent any signals, one way or the other, on either SOPA or its companion bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Volkswagen has agreed to deactivate e-mails for its German staff members’ company BlackBerrys when they are off duty.

Under an agreement reached this week with labor representatives, staff members at Volkswagen will receive e-mails via BlackBerry from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they finish, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time, a spokesman for the company said.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Remember when Microsoft made a $150 million investment in Apple and promised to keep the Mac market alive by continuing development of Mac Office back in 1997, just months before the Cupertino company dissolved into bankruptcy? Microsoft didn't rescue Apple from certain oblivion out of any goodness in its corporate heart; it did it to keep its only ostensible desktop OS competition alive so that it could prove to antitrust regulators that it wasn't so dominant after all. The strategy didn't work all that well, I guess—Microsoft is still suffering from the after-effects of antitrust regulation over a decade later and of course Apple has rebounded perhaps a little too nicely—but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good strategy. In fact, it's so solid that Google is doing something similar today: This week, it renewed its bizarre search deal with Firefox maker Mozilla, promising to inject an astonishing $1 billion in the struggling browser company over the next three years. (And by "astonishing" I mean, "this is THREE times what it was previously paying, back when Firefox still mattered.") Why would it do this? First, it keeps Mozilla kicking around, even while its browser market share nosedives, thanks largely to Google's own browser, Chrome. And second, it keeps competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo! at bay: By overpaying for the search partnership with Mozilla, Google has prevented Microsoft and Yahoo! from securing a similar deal. So it's even better than Microsoft's bailout of Apple. In fact, it's a win-win!

A timely case study on the importance of effective inventory management

Best Buy has alerted some customers that it will not be able to fill their online orders, just days before Christmas.

The largest U.S. specialty electronics retailer said late Wednesday that "overwhelming demand for some products from Bestbuy.com has led to a problem redeeming online orders made in November and December.

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sources said this total amount — just under $1 billion — was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.

“We call it Skypanukkah,” Elliot said of the family’s second year of using the service’s video chat. “Being able to use Skype on a holiday allows me to basically build a memory with my family that I couldn’t have otherwise.”

Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat — has become a regular fixture in a growing number of American homes, providing new ways for families to stay connected in an age where generations are less likely to gather around the table on Sunday afternoons to share a meal.

A multifaceted and free iPad tool from Evernote – check the full post for details and an overview video

Skitch is the amazingly fun and surprisingly powerful way to move your ideas and projects forward using fewer words. With Skitch, annotate and draw on just about anything that you see, whether it’s a new or existing photo, a webpage, screenshot, map, or a blank canvas. Then, share your work with friends, colleagues or save it all to Evernote. It couldn’t be simpler.

Although Mr. Ebersman has played tough with Wall Street bankers, telling them he's skeptical about what they can contribute to an IPO, he's also communicated his interest in moving forward with a standard public offering, people familiar with the matter said. Facebook has little interest in taking a page from Google Inc.'s book, which did an electronic auction-style offering.

Even the CEO's trademark Adidas flip-flops are growing up. Mr. Zuckerberg, 27, has upgraded to Brooks running shoes and went so far as to wear a dark blue tie and sports coat when President Obama visited in April—a sartorial move he was once loathe to take for the many bankers, lawyers and CEOs he meets.

You stand in one place, tapping controls on the screen of your Android phone, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The self-propelled, baseball-size sphere rolls around in the specified direction. You can’t stop yourself from trying to guess how that’s even possible.

There’s a lot of advanced miniature technology inside: a tilt sensor, compass, gyroscope and a little motor with wheels that makes the thing roll.

While other industries struggled, consumer technology seemed to march ahead as always in 2011, with important new products and services continuing to roll out. Sure, some tech companies, like BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, suffered reverses. And some products, like Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad, flopped. But many shone.

I’m guessing the update is not going to be available for my Samsung Galaxy S (Fascinate) “real soon now,” and that Verizon will tell me my upgrade path is a new phone (and renewed 2-year commitment)…

Ice Cream Sandwich is Google Inc.’s name for the latest version of its Android operating system. In coming months the software will be rolled out free of charge to millions of Android phones and tablet computers, but for now you can get it only by purchasing the new Galaxy Nexus smartphone from Samsung Corp.

You might not want to do that. It’s a nice enough phone, but rather pricey at $299.99, and afflicted with poor battery life. If you’re hungry for Ice Cream Sandwich, it might be better to buy a less expensive model that’s compatible with the software, or keep the one you have and wait for an upgrade.

Check the link below for some scary info about the most-watched videos etc.

1,000,000,000,000

That’s how many videos we collectively watched on YouTube in 2011. Or, as the YouTube blog explains, about 140 views for every person on earth and more than double the number of stars in the sky. (Oh, yeah? But it’s nothing compared to our $15 trillion national debt, so there!)

Still, that’s a stunning number. And it’s part of YouTube’s 2011 Rewind feature that looks back at how and what we watched over the past 12 months.

...and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and "activations" means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.

Research In Motion Ltd. advanced 11 percent in late trading after news reports said Microsoft Corp. and Nokia Oyj mulled a joint bid, while Amazon.com Inc. considered buying the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone.

RIM “turned down takeover overtures” from Amazon because it wanted to fix its shortcomings independently, Reuters reported. That was followed by a Wall Street Journal article that said Microsoft and Nokia “flirted with the idea of making a joint bid” in recent months. Both cited unidentified people familiar with the matters.

Still, today’s software update erases the stubbornness that characterized the original Fire software.

Now, if you’re in the market for a tablet, the Fire isn’t the only game in town. Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet ($250) has charms of its own (like much sharper Netflix movie playback), and of course the iPad costs a lot more ($500) but also does a lot more and shows a lot more on its bigger screen.

But if you’re already a happy member of Amazon’s ecosystem — music store, bookstore, movie store — then the Kindle Fire may now be calling your name more loudly than ever. Today’s touch-ups make an enormous difference.

I had fun with these apps, and each uses a different method to draw in users. IntoNow and Showtime Social poll viewers during shows, Shazam displays behind-the-scenes footage, and IntoNow displays related social-network updates and live discussions. The apps virtually introduced me to fans of shows I liked, reminding me of my freshman year of college when I piled into a dorm room with 20 people (many of whom I didn’t know) to watch the series finale of “Felicity:” The show got more interesting in the company of other fans.

Oracle had a bad quarter, but it can now point to at least one large Exadata cloud

Ellison also hinted that Apple is a big Oracle customer. He mentioned a “a very large American smartphone manufacturer” that had bought more than 30 Oracle Exadata systems as it built out its cloud. Unless I’m missing something, there’s really only one company that fits that description, and that’s Apple. Its use of Oracle gear within the mix at its North Carolina data centers has been speculated about before, but never confirmed by Apple directly. (Big surprise, that.)

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

A major product line expansion for Altova; see the link below for more details

Altova FlowForce® Server Beta 1 is an exciting new tool for execution of automated data mappings designed to provide comprehensive management and control over data transformations performed by dedicated high-speed servers, virtual machines, or even regular workstations, depending on the size of the task.

Our source tells us that this is what Google is building. They are in late prototype stages of wearable glasses that look similar to thick-rimmed glasses that “normal people” wear. However, these provide a display with a heads up computer interface. There are a few buttons on the arms of the glasses, but otherwise, they could be mistaken for normal glasses.

[…]

In addition, we have heard that this device is not an “Android peripheral” as the NYT stated. According to our source, it communicates directly with the Cloud over IP. Although, the “Google Goggles” could use a phone’s Internet connection, through Wi-Fi or a low power Bluetooth 4.0.

Many of these employees belong to the community of "workampers," a sort of modern-day migrant worker. Many of them are retirees who spend all or part of the year living in RVs and taking odd seasonal jobs around the country. While some workers really need the money, others said they take the gigs to help fund their adventures or just for fun.

Many current and former seasonal workers said Amazon pays decent wages—about $12 an hour plus overtime in Fernley, which is about 50% better than minimum wage here. But that is in exchange for long hours and tedious labor.

Apple appears less motivated by getting royalties from the companies it is suing, though some patent experts believe that could be posturing on its part. Mr. Jobs’s criticisms took on more urgency as Android began to gain a bigger share of the smartphone market during the last two years.

But when he expressed those criticisms to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, he said he told Eric E. Schmidt, now the executive chairman of Google and a former Apple board member, that he didn’t want money from Google.

Perhaps an answer to the question “How does Quora evolve and expand?” See this Quora blog post for more details.

Quora Boards is basically a social bookmarking tool. Users can curate posts from Quora, links from around the Web, and other content. It’s similar to other sites like Pinterest — though Pinterest tends to be more visual and product-oriented — and Snip.it, (both of which Katie Boehret recently reviewed).

Introducing Boards wasn’t necessarily a play to broaden Quora’s appeal to a larger audience, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever said in a phone interview. The intent was to give users tools they wanted — such as ways to feature their favorite Quora answers, or ways to acknowledge outside resources from the rest of the Web.

“It’s easier to put stuff on a Board than it is to write a five-paragraph answer,” Cheever said.

This will be just the first phase of AT&T’s regret, if we next see a vendor such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft acquire T-Mobile

AT&T will have to pay a giant breakup fee to Deutsche Telekom, as well as enter into an expanded roaming agreement. AT&T said it would take a $4 billion charge in the fourth quarter to account for the cash and spectrum owed to the German telecommunications firm. The charge reflects $3 billion in cash and the $1 billion book value of spectrum owed, though many have placed the value of the spectrum at far more than its book value.

Despite the windfall, the move still leaves Deutsche Telekom without an exit plan for its U.S. holdings, and leaves T-Mobile without a clear path to offer higher-speed LTE service.

With freemium, enterprise upstarts are turning the adoption and implementation process on its head, without having to compete head-on with the giants. By the time Box is talking to an IT buyer about replacing SharePoint or another legacy solution with our product, that company has already experienced our service through its employees. This means corporate customers are not paying until the service has been vetted and deemed successful by their own workers. Gone are the days of radically expensive, failed implementations of enterprise technology.

This new model's disruptive impact on the $246 billion enterprise software market is hard to overstate. Look into nearly any Fortune 500 company and you'll see the expanding footprint of the freemium model. Marketing teams are collaborating via Yammer's real-time activities feed. Sales teams are using Box to pull up important client presentations on their iPads. In some cases, it's the employee using a free version of the service. In others, these tools are sanctioned and paid for by the employer

Monday, December 19, 2011

Perhaps these tablets will be available at the same stores offering “the majority of televisions” by summer 2012 with embedded Google TV capabilities (and/or perhaps Eric Schmidt should reconsider talking with the European press)

Google chairman Eric Schmidt said this week that the company will produce an Android tablet of "the highest quality" in the next six months to better compete with Apple's market-dominating iPad. In an interview published Monday by the Italian-language Corriere della Sera, Schmidt praised the late Steve Jobs as "the Michelangelo of our time" but promised a "brutal competition" between Google and Apple in mobile communications and the smartphone market.

Nokia: The company has more cash, about 10B€ ($13B) and a big partner in Microsoft. The latest Nokia financials are here and show the company’s business decelerates on all fronts, this in a booming market. Even if initial reactions to the newest Windows Phone handsets aren’t said to be wildly enthusiastic, it is a bit early to draw conclusions. But Wall Street (whose wisdom is less than infinite) has already passed judgment:

Let’s put it plainly: No one but RIM needs RIM; but Microsoft’s future in the smartphone (and, perhaps, tablet) market requires a strong Nokia. Other Windows Phone “partners” such as Samsung are happily pushing Android handsets, they don’t need Microsoft the way PC OEMs still need Windows. Why struggle with a two-headed hydra when you can acquire Nokia and have only one CEO fully in charge? Would this be Andy Lees’ mission?

The brain that brings all these things together is the smartphone, which after all is really the first wearable computer. Researchers note that the smartphone is almost never more than three feet away from its user. It is often just inches from the bed during the night as well, and has replaced the alarm clock for many people.

As a result, the smartphone is going to be the hub for our information sharing and gathering. Think of it as a force field that will engulf us wherever we are, transmitting power and Internet access to sensors and screens that are tacked to our clothing.

“Goodnight iPad” leads the reader through a home whose inhabitants are plugged in in every way imaginable, typing on laptops with glowing screens, listening to music, playing video games and watching television. Then the mother figure in the house orders all of the devices shut down, wishing goodnight to “Nooks and digital books,” Eminem and Facebook friends, LOLs and MP3s, and “LCD Wi-Fi HDTV.”

The university announced today a plan to launch “MITx,’’ a set of specially designed Web-only classes that anyone can take for free. Those who earn passing marks may pay the school a small fee for an MITx certificate. Though it will not be an MIT diploma, it could help on a résumé, allowing students to prove mastery of individual subjects without earning full degrees.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.

Jobs loved the Beatles and referred to them fairly often, so I'll use some Beatles references. When John Lennon was a boy, he once recalled seeing Elvis in a movie and suddenly thought to himself, "I want that job!" The theory is that Jobs saw gurus in India, focal points of love and respect, surrounded by devotees, and he similarly thought to himself, "I want that job!"

This observation is not meant as a criticism, and certainly not as an insult. It simply provides an explanatory framework for what made Jobs a unique figure.

NoSQL: the Klingon rite of ascension of database management (bring your own painsticks). Check the full article for some MongoDB customer insights including “Once a problem is discovered, ‘it’s like CSI on your data’ to figure out what the underlying problem is.”

MongoDB might be a popular choice in NoSQL databases, but it’s not perfect — at least out of the box. At last week’s MongoSV conference in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users, including from Disney, Foursquare and Wordnik, shared their experiences with the product. The common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not for companies afraid of hard work.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Meanwhile, as the Republicans try to pick their next non-Romney of the month…

Obama’s advisers won’t divulge much more than that about how the operation works. “I’ll be happy to discuss what we’re doing after we do it,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist. Axelrod reveals only enough to taunt his Republican counterparts. “The things we did in 2008 in many ways were prehistoric by contemporary standards,” he says. “There’s a lot you can do in the way of more finely targeting voters so they’re getting information that’s useful to them.”

Obama’s GOP rivals have taken notice. “Right now, if you want to call this the ‘data arms race,’ clearly Democrats are ahead,” says Alex Gage, chief executive officer of TargetPoint Consulting, who worked on voter targeting for George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection. “Republicans realize they have to catch up, and I’m reasonably confident they will. Will they surpass them? No.”

I think I need to go read a book now… (check the link below for a fascinating and timely evolutionary biology reality check)

What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking, we have ever less incentive to be creative. We become ever more adept at cutting and pasting. The internet and social networking, observes Pagel, may mark the culmination of this long evolutionary trend:

As our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.

I hope readers of the 1.0 book will be entitled to an upgrade discount…

The author discussed potential plans for expanding the already 630-page book in the future. One possibility is doing an extensively annotated version. Another is writing an addendum that addresses the period surrounding Jobs' death. Fleshing out the details seems like a logical next step, since Isaacson believes the Apple (AAPL) CEO's story will be told for decades or a century to come. "This is the first or second draft," he said, referring to his book's role in documenting Jobs' life. "It's not the final draft."

Perhaps the politicians need to spend some time during the end-of-year holiday weighing the opportunity cost of the net present value of contributions from content companies relative to the likely voter popularity hit, amid radical transparency, of voting to cripple the Internet

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee abruptly adjourned today without voting on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial measure that would impose radical new requirements on search engines, ISPs, ad networks and other key internet players. The hearings will resume “earliest practical day that Congress is in session” according to the chief sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex), but with the Congressional holiday recess imminent that could be weeks from now.

[…]

If you’re involved with any type of online marketing, you should learn as much as you can about this proposed legislation, as the implications (mostly negative, unless you’re a large content provider or trademark holder) are huge.

Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.

Check the full article for several reasons why a smaller iPad is likely

There are four reasons to consider such a device, even with the iPad as top tablet. Let me preface them with a baseline thought, however: I’m not suggesting the iPad isn’t a great tablet in its current form. It’s a breakthrough product that has created demand for a market that hasn’t had any since the first tablet PC was introduced in 2001. I have an iPad 2, which offers a superb experience, albeit in a limited fashion. That leads to the first of my reasons.

For Amazon, long-term growth confers two major benefits: the kind of economies of scale enjoyed by Wal-Mart and eliminating or weakening competitors. The book retailer Borders has been forced out of business and a rival, Barnes & Noble, is struggling. Best Buy, the electronics retailer, reported this week that earnings plunged 29 percent, despite higher revenue and a surge of Black Friday sales, because the chain had to cut prices and offer free shipping to compete with Amazon. Amazon inflamed many competitors this holiday season by offering extra discounts to shoppers who took mobile devices into stores and then used them to compare prices and order from Amazon.

Digitimes, citing sources, reported earlier today that Apple is likely to launch a “7.85-inch iPad prior to the fourth quarter of 2012,” in addition to a new iPad scheduled to be released at the end of the first quarter of the year.

"We cannot have a free and open internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry," it reads.

"Censorship of internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship."

Excerpt from a useful snapshot of the apps-versus-Web debate; imho it’s ultimately all about beyond-the-basics hypertext

Simmons goes further, however, and asserts that because the server-side architecture that all apps rely on, both native and web, is now so clean and discrete and independent of its presentation on a phone by a website or an app, the future is actually web apps and native apps that are basically indistinguishable.

I think instead that we'll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps. Native apps will support linking in and out more. Web apps will move more processing to the client — they'll be written more like native apps. (Is Twitter an app or a web app? It's already getting tangled.)

Since Timeline is more concerned about organizing data neatly than shooting out updates in real time, MySQL is well suited for the app. Although the data is aggregated in the same location as the data is kept (i.e. not over a network connection), that data is managed by MySQL, and not an alternative like NoSQL or Hadoop Hbase.

"A lot of people are surprised that for this shiny new thing for Facebook, we’re using MySQL,” Piantino told Wired. “We treat [MySQL] as a generic engine for data manipulation. We use it as a storage engine. And it’s really efficient."

Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, said Kindle sales now look as if they will be “slightly better” than he had forecast. He previously estimated fourth-quarter sales of nine million Kindles — four million Fires and five million other devices. Now he is raising his forecast to 10 million to 12 million.

That is close to the number of tablets Apple is expected to sell. Mr. Munster is estimating iPad sales this quarter of 13.5 million.

Amazon declined to say why it was suddenly so forthcoming. Mr. Munster attributed the release to pressure from investors as well as a more fundamental strategy: If your product is being attacked, you talk it up.

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) said on Thursday it is selling more than one million Kindle devices a week, an unusual disclosure from the largest Internet retailer that comes in the wake of some negative reviews of its new Kindle Fire tablet.

Amazon said customers are buying "well over" one million Kindles per week. This level of sales has occurred for three straight weeks, it added in a statement.

The sales numbers include the Kindle Fire tablet and all the versions of the Kindle e-reader. The company did not break out sales numbers for the Fire tablet alone.

The crisis at Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd. showed no sign of lifting Thursday, as the company said a long awaited product revamp would be delayed until late 2012.

The company's weak earnings pushed its stock to new seven-year lows in after-hours trading, raising fresh questions about how the company can survive against relentless competition from Apple Inc. and Google Inc.

If you have been using Facebook for a while, it would probably be a good idea to block some time to review your timeline before it goes live over the next week or so. Check this Facebook post for details (and a lively discussion thread).

For better or worse, the new format is likely to bring back a lot of old memories. But it could also make it harder to shed past identities — something people growing up with Facebook might struggle with as they move from high school to college and from there to the working world.

“There’s no act too small to record on your permanent record,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard who studies how the Internet affects society. “All of the mouse droppings that appear as we migrate around the Web will be saved.”

If the Internet can be generalized to have one effect across every industry that moves online, that effect would be disaggregation. Choices go from finite to infinite. Navigation goes from sequential to random access. And audiences choose content by the item far more than by the collection. We’ve gone from the packaged and channelized to the unbound and itemized. Autonomous albums are fragmented into songs; series into clips; and magazines and newspapers into articles and individual photos.

As much as we may think that has already happened with video, it is nothing compared to the great leveling that will occur in the voice-controlled living room. Voice-controlled TV means direct navigation to individual episodes, programs and clips. And it will almost certainly lead to a discernible deconstruction of the network and channel structure — not to mention the decomposition of even the aggregated marketplaces like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.

Salesforce just announced that it is buying Rypple, an oddly-named outfit that specializes in performance management and goal-setting. It’s a cloud-based platform for giving employees feedback on how well they do their jobs, and which attempts to make the annual performance-review process — dreaded by so many employees and managers — less, well, dreadful.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Open Source WebOS, then, is really an anti-IBM and -Oracle (Sun) strategy more than anything else. So that’s what Leo Apotheker had in mind! But it can only work if HP makes WebOS truly open to the point of publishing APIs they might otherwise have kept hidden.

Whitman may talk a good game, but I don’t think her troops are ready to be that bold. I think they’ll flinch, perhaps without even telling her, and make WebOS a little less open than it should be. And by doing so they’ll let WebOS fail.

Thus, imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other but the United States. Two bills currently making their way through congress -- SOPA and PIPA -- give the US government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial). While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don't believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.

Research In Motion Ltd.’s mishandled debut of its BlackBerry PlayBook has hurt more than just sales of the tablet. It may be turning off possible buyers of the company.

RIM’s shares have dropped 72 percent since April 19, when the Playbook first hit the U.S. market. Countering that trend, the stock has jumped at least 5 percent nine times since July on speculation a bid might come from a larger technology company, such as Microsoft Corp. or Samsung Electronics Co.

Two of its lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, expressed optimism for Groupon’s outlook but still issued neutral ratings. Morgan Stanley initiated coverage at equal weight, with a $27 price target. It praised Groupon for its “prime mover status and scale,” but warned investors to “wait for a better entry point to build a position.” The firm also pointed out that Groupon’s competitive advantage might be eroded as merchants became more sophisticated on the Web and rivals attacked its market share.

If you envy Apple’s sleek, speedy MacBook Air laptop, and yearn for something like it that comes with the Microsoft Windows operating system, your wish has been granted. It’s a new type of Windows laptop called Ultrabook. A handful already are available, and more are likely to arrive in the new year.

By the time the press and punditry have reached something close to consensus on Amazon’s goals for the initial Kindle Fire, there will probably be several new devices in the product family

Now, neither of us are given to conspiracy theories, hence our use of conditional verb tenses. But it's still striking that despite the device's flaws, analysts are maintaining their predictions that Amazon will move three to five million units this quarter. And despite the device's flaws--indeed, to a certain extent, because of them--the Fire will drive more and more purchasing on Amazon.com. All of which may wind up making the Fire one of the most lucrative mediocre products in history.

Upgrade any conversation from long-form to liveCertain posts act as kindling for face-to-face interaction. Suppose your sister gets engaged, or your roommate lands a job, or your favorite singer shares their concert schedule. You can obviously write comments back and forth, but it's moments like these when you really want to connect in person. That's why we're making it easy to start a hangout from any post on Google+. Just click "Hangout" underneath a post that you’re passionate about, and we’ll add your invitation to the comments. If others are hanging out already, you'll see their invitation in the comments as well.

Starting a hangout on a post (left); Joining a hangout already in progress (right)

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Social networking insights from Paul Adams; his book Grouped is high on my current recommended-reading list

When telling this story, I usually gloss over an important related fact. Although the average Facebook user is only communicating directly with four of their 130 friends in any given week, they are consuming content from a much larger number of those people. After all, over 50% of active Facebook users come back every day. If you include consuming updates from people as communication, then people are interacting with many more than four, but much of the communication is asymmetrical in nature. I may not communicate directly with you, but I do keep up with what’s going on in your life.

Looking likely Alec Baldwin may soon be able to play Words with Friends whenever he wants to

The rule barring passengers from using a Kindle, an iPad, or even a calculator, were originally made to protect the electronics of an aircraft from interference. Yet pilots with iPads will be enclosed in the cockpit just a few inches from critical avionics on a plane.

There is some thought that the rule disallowing devices during takeoff and landing was made to insure passengers paid attention. The F.A.A. has never claimed this. (If this was the case, passengers would not be allowed to have books, magazines or newspapers during takeoff and landing.)

At last week's MIT workshop, David Clark, an MIT computer scientist who was the Internet's chief protocol architect in the 1980s, said that the Internet will need to be engineered to both resist attack and to make it difficult for individual regimes to shape it to their liking.

"Did we design it to be resilient to attack and control? The answer is no," Clark said. "We thought about it being resilient to failure, and that's different. We need now to think about a discipline of designs relevant to control."

Clark added: "The future is not centered on performance, but centered on control and power. We are not trained, as computer scientists, to evaluate things from that perspective."

Jive enters the major league of enterprise collaboration/social business

Jive Software’s successful debut on the Nasdaq on Tuesday reflects investor enthusiasm for social media companies, though it is unclear how eager businesses are to bring a Facebook-style network to the workplace.

Jive provides social software to businesses, including customised social networks for customers, and internal networks and collaboration tools for employees. After pricing its shares at $12 on Monday, it traded as high as $16.50 on Tuesday, a 38 per cent jump, closing at $15.05, giving the 10-year old company a valuation of more than $662m.

The airplane that his new company, Stratolaunch Systems, plans to build will be larger and heavier than the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s record-setting flying boat that flew, just once, in 1947. With wings that will stretch 385 feet — longer than a football field — it will dwarf the double-decker Airbus A380, which is the biggest commercial passenger plane flown today. It will take off from a runway, fly to a normal cruising altitude and then drop off a rocket, eliminating the need for costly launching pads.

In place of that free-for-all will be a new YouTube, more commercial, more predictable and, its owners hope, more televisionlike. The underlying reason is money, of course, but the immediate issue is control. By cutting away the user-driven underbrush and shepherding viewers, especially those with YouTube accounts, toward TV-like content channels — an increasing number of them produced by corporate media partners — YouTube and its owner, Google, will gain more control by giving amateur videographers less exposure and funneling viewers toward fewer choices.

tbd if Microsoft’s apparent strategy to relegate non-PC devices to satellite status (i.e., you do your primary work on a Windows PC using Office, and selectively interact with the content/services/etc. from other devices), essentially treating the iPad, for example, like a super-sized iPhone, will be successful

First, Microsoft realizes that it doesn't dominate computing anymore--especially the mobile world. That reality is running into another key fact: Microsoft applications are everywhere.

In other words, Microsoft's plans to launch iPad versions of OneNote, Lync and SkyDrive, which isn't optimized for Apple'stablet, is just smart business. Simply put, the killer app on a single platform days are over.

Crowdsourcing FUD – I wonder if these guys received free Android phones

Want a free Windows Phone? Well, it turns out that you may be able to get one for free - all you need to do is tell Microsoft about the malware problems you've had with Android smartphones.

Yes, that's right. Microsoft's latest social media marketing initiative is not to focus on the benefits of a Windows Phone device but instead - in a somewhat below-the-belt punch - invite Android users to share their stories of malware woe.

Goldman Sachs expects Amazon to sell six million Fires by the end of the year. And it figures the Kindle creator will sell between 15.5 million and 20.5 million during the tablet’s first full year of availability.

Like many of the 100 million monthly active Twitter users, I tweet all the time, but I stopped doing it through Twitter’s own site, Twitter.com, ages ago. That’s because tons of desktop and mobile apps, such as TweetDeck and even Twitter for BlackBerry, are simply more feature-filled and easier to use.

Now Twitter has revamped its website, deconstructing its menus to be more approachable and easier to use, even for Twitter newbies. So I returned to the site and found three features that make a big difference. Meanwhile, two features I hoped would, by now, be available on the site still aren’t.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Check the post link below for more details, including a Clever Sense CEO video explaining, in part, how much his team likes working with … Windows Phone (as a Microsoft BizSpark participant); I’m guessing they may be starting an Android port soon [update: it must be a stale video; they already support iOS and Android, but I’m not seeing a Windows Phone version…]

As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is like “Pandora for the real world” and was dedicated to creating a comprehensive “interest graph.” Clever Sense assigns or maps physical places to one another based on styles, characteristics and attributes in the same way that Pandora does for music. However this process is all done by “artificial intelligence.”

How the service works is if a friend spots a suicidal thought on someone's page, he can report it to Facebook by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook then sends an email to the person who posted the suicidal comment encouraging them to call the hotline or click on a link to begin a confidential chat.

Facebook on its own doesn't troll the site for suicidal expressions, Wolens said. Logistically it would be far too difficult with so many users and so many comments that could be misinterpreted by a computer algorithm.

"The only people who will have a really good idea of what's going on is your friends so we're encouraging them to speak up and giving them an easy and quick way to get help," Wolens said.

Market research firm Strategy Analytics today reported on the release of its new research report covering "connected TV players" such as the current Apple TV and Roku boxes. According to the report, Apple is predicted to reach sales of four million Apple TV units for 2011, leading the way in a rapidly-growing market with a 32% share.

“Apple is leading this nascent market, which it still considers a ‘hobby’.” says Jia Wu, Senior Analyst at the Connected Home Devices (CHD) service. “As Apple prepares for its expected launch of smart TVs in 2012, rival platforms must accelerate their development plans to keep Apple from running away with the connected TV business, as it has done in smartphones and digital music.”

Apple is reportedly going to use part of its enormous pile of cash to buy an Israeli fabless semiconductor company that specializes in flash storage solutions. Calcalist reports – in Hebrew – that the world’s most valuable company is in talks to buy Herzliya Pituach, Israel-based Anobit for $400 million to $500 million.

Google begins to integrate Blogger and Google+ (note that I used Chrome and Amplify rather than IE and Windows Live Writer to capture this post, because the Blogger Buzz blog does not work in IE 9 -- you have to click through to see a "non-dynamic" version of the page, after viewing a suggestion to "upgrade your browser" to a list of alternatives... which includes IE; go figure)

Back in October we made it possible for Blogger in Draft users to use their Google+ profile on their blog. This option is now available to all Blogger users, and as a result, we're starting to roll out the first of many Google+ features.

Starting today, if you have linked your blog to your Google+ account you will be presented with a prefilled Google+ share box immediately after publishing a post. The share box will contain a +snippet of your post that you can share with your circles on Google+.

Check the full post for more details. On a related note, eWeek, née PC Week, published its final print issue last week. [20111214 update from Ziff Davis (via email): "You are currently a subscriber to eWEEK, Baseline and/or CIO Insight magazine, published by Ziff Davis Enterprise. As of January 1, 2012, all subscriptions will only be available in a digital format. Print delivery will be discontinued. We’re also increasing frequency: Baseline and CIO Insight will be published monthly and eWEEK will be published every other week."]

According to an eMarketer analysis of time spent with media, TV and mobile saw significant gains vs. 2010 — with conventional TV the winner and still champion. According to the data presented, the average US adult spends about 4 hours and 34 minutes per day watching TV. Multitasking is counted as time spent independently with each medium.

Jive Software Inc., the maker of social-networking software for businesses, raised $161.3 million in its initial public offering, 38 percent more than it sought, after pricing the shares above the marketed range.

The Palo Alto, California-based company sold 13.4 million shares at $12 apiece, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, after saying it would offer 11.7 million for $8 to $10 each. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market starting tomorrow [today] under the symbol JIVE.

Far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach, that year was attached to more predictions of technological innovations from readers than any other in the interactive, crowd-sourced timeline published online with “The Future of Computing,” last week’s special issue of Science Times.

Looks like the singularity may not happen in time for today’s population, however…

2114: MEMORY BACKUP “Human memory backup system: the whole brain can be synced to the cloud. Humans can restore and backup their memories to the system. The system can even restore memories into a new body after end of the original owner’s life.”

I am not super-impressed with OneNote for iPad so far; more details to follow

Microsoft on Monday released an iPad version of OneNote as well as versions of its Lync corporate communications program for iOS, Android and Symbian.

It’s part of the difficult balancing act facing Microsoft in mobile. While Redmond does its most extensive work for its own Windows Phone operating system (and did so for Windows Mobile before that), the company knows it can’t afford to ignore the more dominant operating systems.

“I have asked Andy Lees to move to a new role working for me on a time-critical opportunity focused on driving maximum impact in 2012 with Windows Phone and Windows 8,” Ballmer said in an internal memo seen by AllThingsD. “We have tremendous potential with Windows Phone and Windows 8, and this move sets us up to really deliver against that potential.”

Monday, December 12, 2011

Available now, at least in the U.S. Apple App Store Apparently just waiting for Apple App Store approval; check the full post for more details including pricing options. I look forward to exploring, and will share more, er, notes, as I learn more about it

Today, just in time for the holidays, we’re releasing OneNote 1.3 for iOS. Since the launch of OneNote for iPhone nearly a year ago, a recurring request from our customers has been for a version that can be used more easily on the iPad's larger screen. We're happy to announce that today's new release of OneNote for iOS devices includes a version that's tailored for the iPad.

The New York Times came out with an article today making the Kindle Fire out to be a big loser, citing a few experts, customer complaints and how it doesn’t measure up to the iPad. It never really talks much about the Kindle as a Kindle replacement, and that’s where the story misses the Kindle’s real advantage.

Shares of Jive Software, the social enterprise and collaboration software company, will price today and will debut on the Nasdaq exchange tomorrow morning, sources familiar with the matter tell AllThingsD. The debut will cap a process that began in August when it filed its first form S1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Along with Taleo, Jive will quickly become part of the conversation concerning cloud-based acquisition targets.

Interesting times, but I’m assuming Google will eventually take the lead in providing “free” (as in you trade your usage data for access) mobile broadband network services

Niklas Zennstrom's FreedomPop has signed a mind-boggling deal with LightSquared to provide free broadband to everyone in America.

FreedomPop only exists as a landing page where one can register an interest in having free mobile broadband, and if it weren't for the involvement of one of Skype's founders it could easily be mistaken for a scam - it sounds too good to be true.